May We Be Forgiven

A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation.

Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change.

May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. “This novel starts at maximum force -- and then it really gets going. I can't remember when I last read a novel of such narrative intensity; an unflinching account of a catastrophic, violent, black-comic, transformative year in the history of one broken American family. Flat-out amazing.” —Salman Rushdie

“I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and couldn’t sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better.” —Gary Shteyngart

“What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes.” —John Sayles

“I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life.” —Jeanette Winterson

In the late 1980s, when AM Homes was studying at the renowned Iowa Writers' Workshop, finishing a series of short stories, she kept a Barbie doll in her apartment. She thought of it as a particularly innocent-looking Barbie, dressed in white, aimed specifically at younger children. There was a note on the box that declared: "'Now with bigger buttons!'" she says, "so it was easier for girls to undress, for little kids who don't have good hand control." It sat on a counter, and she started imagining a story around it, something innocent, to fit the doll's image. Yet everyone who came to visit her almost immediately stripped Barbie's clothes off. Homes felt a little confused and affronted by this. "Then they would tell me strange things. It became like a Barbie therapy session." She ended up writing a story about a teenage boy who feels attracted to his sister's Barbie, a doll that is a walking, talking, sentient being, albeit only 11.5 inches tall. He drugs the doll with Valium, and has sex with her. Then, one day, when Ken, Barbie's boyfriend, has had his head removed, the boy ejaculates into the hole. This makes him wonder if he might be gay, which would seem the least of his worries.

Now in her early 50s, Homes has spent the last 30 years chronicling the surreal undercurrents of everyday life, the darkness behind closed doors, the absurdity beneath the perky, affluent, suburban version of the American dream. What she's interested in, she says, is "the gap between who people are publicly and privately ... What I'm doing, which sometimes makes people uncomfortable, is saying the things we don't want to say out loud."

That's as true as ever of her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, which includes, in the first few pages, a man imagining his brother and brother's wife having sex, and thereafter charts a path of destruction and severely hard-won redemption. This week it won the Women's prize for fiction (formerly the Orange, soon to be the Baileys), in a year with a glitteringly strong shortlist, with nominees including Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson, Barbara Kingsolver and the woman who has scooped most of the country's other major literary awards, Hilary Mantel.

When I catch up with Homes, the morning after the awards – she was up until 2am, awoke at 4am, but still rushes breakneck through ideas – she says she had no expectation of winning. She wrote a few notes for a speech "in a grudging way, thinking, God, why am I even doing this?" Did it feel good to beat Mantel? "No. I mean, come on! To win those three in a row [Booker, Costa, Women's prize] would have been incredible for her, and hearing her read the night before, I just thought, my God, I could listen to this for ever." Homes has a reputation for transgression, yet she is also a girl scout leader with a young daughter, and a highly developed moral sense. She writes about secrets and incongruities, yet comes across as bracingly forthright.

She started the book about seven years ago, as the result of fellow nominee, Smith, asking her to contribute to a book of short stories. Homes started one that she didn't have time to finish back then, but later picked it up and just kept on writing. The novel's short-story roots are clear in the pace of its opening pages, which take in a Thanksgiving meal, the turkey-greased start of an affair, a fatal car crash and domestic violence. We're introduced to the central character, Harry, who is a hapless, helpless Nixon scholar, along with his brother, George, an incredibly angry, successful executive, who has changed the face of TV with the shows Your Life Sucks and Refrigerator Wars. By page nine, George is in a psychiatric ward, and when Harry ponders whether this is the right place for him, George's wife Jane replies: "It's the suburbs. How dangerous could a suburban psych ward be?"

It took the Women's prize judges four hours to settle on May We Be Forgiven, but it's easy to see why. The chair, Miranda Richardson, praised its darkness and wit, saying it had made them all laugh out loud on the train. The novel is a mix of the smallest, funniest observations, essaying the many ways people succeed in saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, while also exploring sweeping themes, including the growth of technology, the rise of China, the dangers of individualism and instant gratification.

The book has been called a contender for that mythic construct, the great American novel. Is that what she set out to write? Homes says she's thought about this, and did once look up the way that that phrase was first intended. "It was not meant as a critical judgment – 'Oh, this is a great American novel' – but great as in expansive, and far reaching, and so in that sense, absolutely, very much, I think of myself, in positive and negative ways, as a very American writer." Her fellow citizens don't always appreciate the lens she turns on them. Her six novels have tended to receive highly divided reviews, with some notable stinkers from the New York Times's most famous critic, Michiko Kakutani.

"In America, people get confused and sort of pissed off with me, because I think they feel like they're being criticised," she says. "And I think, from other countries, with a little bit of distance, it's a clearer view."

A key paragraph in May We Be Forgiven addresses the growth of technology, stating that "there is a world out there, so new, so random and dissociated that it puts us all in danger". It's a world where kids play on computer games while travelling to their mother's funeral, where our protagonist contacts women on the internet for sex – one of whom turns out, in fact, not to be a woman, but a young brother and sister who feel abandoned by their parents, and who summon Harry through subterfuge and handcuff him. "Basically, our life sucks," says the boy, "Our parents pay no attention to us, Dad works all the time, Mom's entirely electronic."

Homes says she usually avoids references to technology, because it dates the writing, but this time she wanted to chart how it's changing us. "I think what's interesting about the internet is that people now present themselves in chatrooms – and not always dating or sex sites – as different versions of themselves. There is a fracturing of identity, and the question becomes: 'Well, who am I really? When I go out into the world and meet somebody I've met on this site, and present myself in a different way, which version of myself am I?' I think there's a lot of dissonance in there, in how we describe ourselves to ourselves."

The use of technology arguably adds to Harry's mid-life meltdown – he's been described as a Job character, swiftly losing his wife, job, house and credit card – but also helps him form and maintain the relationships that save him. May We Be Forgiven has been accused of sentimentality, and there's no doubt that, as in her previous novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, she's interested in the ways human contact can mend her fractured male protagonists, an interest that sits uneasily beside her satire.

The tone of her novels changed after 9/11, she says, an event she witnessed and recorded on camera from her window in downtown Manhattan. That was the first time "that I felt the world around me was unstable, and that it was difficult to then ... go into my imagination and make something else. I was also thinking a lot about our responsibilities to each other, and how to be optimistic at a time that's not optimistic. That really prompted me, with both of these two novels, to try, as organically as possible, to figure out what would need to happen for these characters to feel some sense of hope by the end, as opposed to what I think is the traditional end of a novel: death."

Homes grew up in Washington DC, the adopted daughter of an artist father, and a mother who worked as a school guidance counsellor. She was contacted by her birth mother in her early 30s, and wrote about the experience of meeting her and her birth father in the 2007 memoir The Mistress's Daughter. She was no less stringent with herself in that work than she is with her characters; when she met her birth father, she wrote, she imagined having sex with him. Overall, the reunion didn't go that well – the more she spoke to her birth mother, the happier she was she'd been given up – but she is glad it happened.

Did being adopted create a space, as a child, to fill with stories about her roots? She was in no doubt about who her parents were. "It was Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag, and it was a one-night thing. Of course! I've had interesting talks with Edward Albee, the playwright, who's also adopted, about the sense of distance, the dissonance, of being in a family that you're not related to. Plenty of people say 'I don't fit in in my family,' but the true biological dissonance [of adoption] is a very real and palpable thing, but incomprehensible to those that haven't felt it. It's like being George Washington, but being told you're Abraham Lincoln."

She didn't enjoy school. In her teens, when a teacher told her she had an attitude problem, she refused to go back for a year, and stayed at home writing a book of poetry she called An Introduction to Death, with Excerpts from Life. While studying at Sarah Lawrence college in New York State, aged 19, she wrote her first novel, Jack, and a play that was partly about JD Salinger. The notoriously private author was not happy, and threatened to sue her. "Can you imagine how you'd feel? Your hero says: 'You're in trouble now!' My hair started falling out. I was a wreck. And we changed the name of Catcher in the Rye to Life in the Outfield in the hope that would fix it. It was performed, and I was so shy I couldn't go to the opening. I spent the night driving around Washington DC in circles."

Salinger dropped the threat, and while this experience – "stressful beyond belief" – might have made some authors play it safe, Homes has always chosen to take the most difficult path. Her 1996 novel, The End of Alice, which focuses on a paedophile in prison, and his correspondence with a woman who also has a sexual interest in children, was described as "repugnant" by the NSPCC, which called for a boycott. WHSmith refused to stock it. I ask if this shocked her, and she says the biggest surprise was that the book didn't receive a similar response in her country. Instead, in the US, "there was a very passionate range of reviews, from positive to wildly negative, and I remember the publisher saying, 'What do we do?' And I said, use them together, because that's the thing. It is not meant as a book that you [love]. When someone says to me 'I love that book,' I'm thinking: 'That's worrisome.'" Artistically and intellectually, it's the hardest story she's ever written, but she wanted to push people to talk about the subject. "Until we're willing to deal with it, it will continue to happen."

Homes is private about some aspects of her life. Her friend Jeanette Winterson has written that Homes "is gay but describes herself more honestly as bisexual," and she's understandably protective of her daughter, Juliet. But she is willing to go further than almost anyone in exploring the human psyche. Is there anything she's wanted to write, that she's thought was going too far? "I think I've taken care of that already!" she says. "When people say they're shocked by something, I think it just means I hit a nerve."

AM Homes Wins Women's Prize for Fiction with 'Dazzling' Satire

AM Homes has beaten Hilary Mantel to win the Women's Prize for Fiction with her sixth novel May We Be Forgiven, a dark satire of contemporary America.

May We Be Forgiven focuses on how a shocking act of violence changes the lives of Harry Silver, a historian and Nixon scholar, and his brother George, a high-flying TV executive with a beautiful wife and two children.

"Homes plays with the substance of the American dream, and gives us a horrific, internet-age deconstruction," said Philip Womack in his Daily Telegraph review.

"May We Be Forgiven is a semi-serious, semi-effective, semi-brilliant novel which could not be called, overall, an artistic success," wrote Theo Tate in The Guardian.

"But you'd have to have no sense of the absurd, and no sense of humour, not to be pretty impressed."

Speaking to the BBC, actress Richardson described May We Be Forgiven as a work of "untrammelled imagination".

"It's 21st Century but with ancient themes," she said. "It's not a re-working of anything.

"It's original and viscerally funny and, in the end, irresistible."

The judges' deliberations, which lasted almost four hours on Tuesday night, had been "passionately argued", she said.

Mantel's previous wins for Bring Up The Bodies had not affected the final decision, Richardson added.

"Our concern never can be about what other people think - it's what we think.

"Inevitably, the prize each year is about the individual and collective taste and opinions of whoever the judges are."

"This is the crowning achievement for a fascinating and unpredictable writer, one who fully deserves to be alongside contemporary American greats such as Cormac McCarthy and Richard Ford," said Jonathan Ruppin, web editor for Foyles Bookshop.

"It's a powerful exploration of where the American dream went wrong, laced with sharp observation, pathos and dark humour."

Homes, who lives in New York City, is the the author of two collections of short stories, Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects.

Her novels include The End of Alice (1996), about an imprisoned paedophile and his correspondence with a teenage girl, and This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), a Los Angeles-set tale about one man's efforts to find redemption.

Her 2007 memoir The Mistress's Daughter told of her adoption and her subsequent reunion with her biological parents when she was in her early thirties.

Homes also wrote and produced for television series The L Word, about the lives of a group of lesbians living in Los Angeles.

Debut US novelist Madeline Miller won the prize last year for The Song of Achilles, a story of same-sex romance set in the Greek age of heroes.

Other previous winners include Lionel Shriver for We Need to Talk about Kevin (2005), Marilynne Robinson for Home (2009) and Tea Obreht for The Tiger's Wife (2011).

Earlier this week the Women's Prize for Fiction announced a new three-year partnership with liqueur brand Baileys.

From 2014, the literary award will be known as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

The prize this year has been privately supported by companies and individual donors - among them Cherie Blair, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox and author Joanna Trollope.

AM Homes: I was No Shoo-in but Fiction Prize Means I Can Now Afford New Shoes

American author AM Homes said she might buy herself new shoes after wearing a 10-year-old pair to win the £30,000 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The writer, 51, said the victory cheque would also go towards paying off the loan that funded her during the seven years it took to write May We Be Forgiven. “It’s a great relief,” she said.

“I’m a single parent. I work hard but I end up by wearing shoes I’ve had for 10 years. I might spring for something big. I’m a literary writer and it’s not like the books fly off the shelves.

“Honestly, to pay the home loan and get a new pair of shoes is an incredibly good day for me.”

Speaking at last night’s ceremony in the Royal Festival Hall, Homes — the mother of a 10-year-old girl — said she had long been in awe of the Women’s Prize, formerly the Orange.

“I always dreamed that one day maybe I would win it,” she said. “But a man murders his wife in my first few pages so I wasn’t sure it would be a shoo-in for a women’s prize. This is the first actual book award I’ve won.”

Judges’ chairman Miranda Richardson called the book “a dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy — a subversion of the American dream”.

The tale of rivalry between two brothers began as a short story encouraged by fellow prize nominee Zadie Smith. It sees Homes write, like she has before, as a man. “When I write female characters it’s not so much a process of discovery,” she said. “When I write a male character it’s more imaginative.”

She revealed her horror as she researched sections of the novel in which her protagonist Harry uses the internet to find women for sex.

“Everyone thinks I’m so daring and provocative but the truth is I was shocked and mesmerised by what’s out there,” she said.

Homes — known as AM even to friends because “I’m just not a good Amy” — said she was more accepted in Britain than in the US, where she lives in New York and where Americans fear she is mocking them. Sometimes she is.

Her rival Hilary Mantel said she was very glad for Homes, even though the judges’ decision deprived her of the literary triple awards of the Costa, Man Booker and Women’s Prize.

AM Homes Wins Women's Prize for Fiction

US author wins with May We Be Forgiven, beating bookmakers' favourite Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel.

An often breathtakingly dark and crazy satire on modern American life caused a literary upset on Wednesday night when it won the women's prize for fiction beating novels by Zadie Smith, Kate Atkinson and the bookies' favourite, Hilary Mantel.

AM Homes became the fifth American in a row to be named winner of the £30,000 prize, formerly known as the Orange, for her sixth novel, May We Be Forgiven.

The actor Miranda Richardson, who chaired the judging panel, said the book went beyond the prize's criteria of originality, accessibility and excellence. "It was so fresh and so funny – darkly funny – and so unexpectedly moving," she said.

May We Be Forgiven has a devastating car crash, adultery and a murder within the space of the first 14 pages and then never lets up as it charts the increasingly out of control life of Harry, a middle-aged Richard Nixon studies professor.

"It is a book where we all found ourselves laughing out loud on trains or wherever we were reading," said Richardson. "You're laughing in kind of fear or horror as much as anything else. It's relentless, but great."

May We Be Forgiven was named winner of a competition now in its 18th year after a judging session that lasted nearly four hours. That reflected the strength of the shortlist, said Richardson. "Everything was very passionately debated because all these books were capable of winning. Everything was up in the air at several points in the evening but we are all very happy with what we've ended up with."

Homes had a beautifully untrammelled imagination, she said. "There are some minute and wonderful observations and we all loved the characterisations – and the perversion. Standing the American dream on its head and asking us to think about what family may be these days as it becomes more and more complicated."

Richardson said the book reflected her belief: "If you can imagine it, it is probably happening somewhere. Which is a very dark thing to think, but honest."

The book is crammed full with mental breakdown, crime, sex and laser shooting games. Richardson praised the heightened reality in the work: "Or at least we hope it is heightened because God help us if it's not".

The bookmakers' favourite was Mantel who would have made literary history by winning the Man Booker, the Costa and the women's fiction prize with the same book, Bring Up The Bodies, the second in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.

Richardson said: "You can't think of what other people might think, want or hope. I am such an admirer [of Mantel] and I think it is the most wonderful book and that doesn't go away."

The win will undoubtedly provide a sales boost for Homes, also a writer for TV – series two of The L Word and a planned HBO show called The Hamptons – as well as novels including The End of Alice, which was controversially narrated by a paedophile, and in 2006, This Book Will Save Your Life.

The other novels on the shortlist were Smith's NW, Atkinson's Life After Life, Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour and Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette. The judging panel included the BBC correspondent Razia Iqbal, fellow journalist Rachel Johnson, the author Jojo Moyes and the writer Natasha Walter.

Homes's win continues recent American domination of the competition, won by Madeline Miller last year, and Téa Obreht, Kingsolver and Marilynne Robinson before that. The most recent British winner was Rose Tremain in 2008.

This year's competition had been trickier than most because of Orange's decision to end its sponsorship. The prize was bankrolled by supporters, including Cherie Booth, Joanna Trollope and Lady Lane-Fox.

Next year it will be known as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction after a deal was struck with the liqueur maker – a move that has been broadly welcome although not without some jokes. The comic writer John O'Farrell tweeted: "Women's Prize for Fiction to be sponsored by Baileys. (Nominated books to be given out at Xmas & finished off by teenage daughter & friends)."

AM Homes Wins 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction

The Women's Prize for Fiction has been won by American author AM Holmes, denying Hilary Mantel a literary hattrick.

The American author A M Homes has won the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction, beating Hilary Mantel, the bookies' favourite to win.

Homes, joint second favourite with Zadie Smith, won the £30,000 prize with her sixth novel, May We Be Forgiven, a hilariously dark exploration of the tarnished American dream.

Miranda Richardson, chair of judges, said: “Our 2013 shortlist was exceptionally strong and our judges’ meeting was long and passionately argued, but in the end we agreed that May We Be Forgiven is a dazzling, original, viscerally funny black comedy – a subversion of the American dream. This is a book we want to read again and give to our friends.”

Homes’s book has been widely praised for its opening, in which an illicit Thanksgiving kiss sparks a hideous sequence of events, including a fatal road accident, murderous domestic violence and a divorce, which all occur in remarkably quick succession.

"This award is super special to me," Homes said at the prize ceremony last night. "It's the first actual book award I've won. I've always been in awe of this prize and I've always dreamed I would win it.

"There are so many people i want to thank, but I especially want to thank my grandfather who passed away last month and my grandmother who loaned me the money to buy a typewriter - and made me pay her back for it!"

Homes's win interrupts Mantel’s astonishing winning streak which has already seen her win the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book of the Year.

Had Mantel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, formerly known as the Orange Prize and from next year to be called the Baileys Prize, she would have been the first author to win the three major awards of British literature. She has never won the Women's Prize for Fiction, although this year marks the third time she has been on the shortlist.

Richardson described the process of choosing this year's winner as "exhausting, exhilarating and worth it. There is nothing better than being in the company of great writing. The prize is of global significance and its presence is vital."

Homes’s fiction has had a controversial reception in the past. Her 1997 novel The End of Alice, the story of a friendship between a 19-year-old girl and an imprisoned paedophile, sparked outrage in the UK. The NSPCC called for it to be banned, fearing it would encourage child-molesters. WH Smith refused to stock the book.

Homes had an unusual upbringing which she has described as “wild”. She was adopted from a young age by a liberal Jewish couple and she dropped out of school at 16.

“Any way in which you could be wild, I was wild,” she said in a recent interview.

“Not just the obvious sex and drugs stuff. I lied, I stole, I played with matches. I was this crazy weird little con-artist.”

Homes was also sued by J D Salinger during her first year at university. She wrote a play in which Holden Caulfield accused his creator of stealing his life. Homes was forced to change the name of the play from The Catcher in the Rye to Life in the Outfield.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world. It has provoked controversy in the past for its all-female shortlists, which have led some critics to brand the award as sexist. Alongside Homes, Smith and Mantel, this year's shortlist also included Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life.

The ceremony was hosted at the Royal Festival Hall in London and hosted by the Chair of the Women’s Prize for Fiction board, Kate Mosse. The award was presented by Miranda Richardson.

Women's Prize for Fiction - Interview with Winner A. M. Homes

A.M. Homes in London for publication of May We Be Forgiven

In autumn 2012 A.M. Homes visited London to promote her acclaimed new novel, 'May We Be Forgiven'. Through the week of her visit she was followed by film producers 'The Film Atelier' - the resulting film...

A.M. Homes at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

A. M. Homes is the author of the memoir 'The Mistress's Daughter' and the novels 'This Book Will Change Your Life,' 'Music for Torching,' and 'The Safety of Objects.' Her new novel, 'May We Be Forgiven,' ..

Women's Prize for Fiction - Interview with Winner A. M. Homes

A.M. Homes in London for publication of May We Be Forgiven

In autumn 2012 A.M. Homes visited London to promote her acclaimed new novel, 'May We Be Forgiven'. Through the week of her visit she was followed by film producers 'The Film Atelier' - the resulting film...

A.M. Homes at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

A. M. Homes is the author of the memoir 'The Mistress's Daughter' and the novels 'This Book Will Change Your Life,' 'Music for Torching,' and 'The Safety of Objects.' Her new novel, 'May We Be Forgiven,' ..

What kind of historical research did you do on Richard Nixon and the era of his administration for the novel?

I did a lot of research, everything from reading books by and about Nixon, of which there are hundreds, to visiting the Nixon Library—which has a great Web site as well—and enormous amounts of information/documents available. What’s really interesting is that more information, more documents keep being released. The White House Special Files Unit was created in 1972 to provide secure storage for politically and personally sensitive materials—those files are still slowly being uncorked. Also, I grew up in Washington D.C. during Nixon’s time, so my childhood was very much influenced/affected by his presidency. Among what people forget about Nixon is that he opened our relationship with China—and it so happens that I was among those at the National Zoo the day Pat Nixon welcomed the first panda bears to this country.

What are your thoughts on alternative criminal reform programs? How did you come up with The Woodsman program that George takes part in?

The classic model of putting people behind bars and throwing away the key seems pointless. People serving time in prison should be given an education, job training, and skills to enable them to succeed outside of prison. I think of crime as a social issue in many ways and wonder whether if we better prepared people to work and care for themselves we’d have less crime. I am in favor of prisons that have working farms where inmates learn to grow their own food and places where families can gather. The isolation of the prison experience isn’t helpful in the long run if you’re expecting inmates to return as functioning members of society.

This novel is full of wonderful moments of physical comedy. Is it difficult to write physical comedy? Who are your comedic influences?

Would it be too ironic to say Harold Pinter?

When you’re working on a project, do you think of the book or story you’re writing as a “foul thing” you need to expel (as Harold says of his own book on Nixon)? Or do you think of it in gentler terms, like a child you’re bringing into the world? Do you experience the writing process as an act of cathartic release?

I wish I experienced it as a cathartic release. It took me seven years to write this book—if it was cathartic, I think I’d be either ecstatic or dead at this point! I think of writing fiction as a wonderful kind of travel experience—I get to inhabit people who are very different from me and move through their lives and explore ideas that I find interesting—but often from very different points of view. The truth is I love being in the middle of a novel. It’s the beginning that’s difficult. In the case of this book, writing about Harry, a man who doesn’t know himself well, was hard until Harry literally began to open up, and then it all got a lot easier.

Early on in the novel, Harold wishes he could talk to Don DeLillo about Nixon. Later Harold spots DeLillo around town on a couple of occasions, finally working up the courage to speak to him. How much of an influence has DeLillo been on your writing?

Don DeLillo appears in the novel for several reasons—the first being because he’s an amazing writer, and I especially admire his ability to blend fact and fiction, something that I attempted to do in this novel on a larger scale than I ever have before. Also, because DeLillo in reality lives not far from where I imagine the novel to be set, it’s plausible within the frame of the book for DeLillo to literally pass through. And in some ways the irony of DeLillo as both a writer and a character appeals to me. DeLillo himself is quite shy, slightly cryptic in conversation and affect, and I just am in awe of him—so it’s a tip of the hat to a master.

I noticed the repeated use of the word “downloading” to refer to characters in conversation, such as on p. 467 when Harold is on the phone with Amanda: “She’s downloading information, letting each bit go . . .” Why this use of tech language to depict human interactions?

We have adapted tech talk as human talk—we go to dinner and download our friends on the state of our lives. When informing others of things, we say I’m going to upload you. . . . The real question is when and how we’ll find words for emoticons. . . .

How do you get inside the head of a character like Harold? How much does character development steer the plot in your work?

I always spend a lot of time thinking about a character’s history: their life up until the moment the book begins, what’s been won or lost over the years, their view of themselves and their own lives. Harry always seemed to me like someone waiting for his life to begin—not fully realizing that in fact he is responsible for his own success or failure. I don’t really think about plot, I think about my characters and their lives and the journey they’re on—and off we go on an adventure. . . .

How did you go about developing the voice and style for Nixon’s fiction?

I thought a lot about Nixon’s background, his Quaker history and his values—including the fact that he came from a family where two of his brothers died when he was quite young. There is so much about Nixon’s success anddownfall that is specifically related to the time period in which he lived—Nixon’s life span is an interesting one in terms of the social/cultural/economic and technological development it encompasses, from the tape recorder to the television. Also, there are many stories about Nixon having a bit of a drinking problem and perhaps not being very nice to Pat. So I was able to thread some of the more difficult material into fiction rather that putting it in the body of the book and perhaps distracting the reader.

Your novel offers both a state of the union on the Great American Novel and a commentary on the state of the American nuclear family—where do you think we are and where are we going?

Ahh, the big questions. Curiously, I am often asked about the difference between fiction written by men and by women—the assumption being that only men can write the Great American Novel. And while perhaps traditionally men have written the larger social and political novels while women have tended towards exploring the domestic and more interior experience, May We Be Forgiven does both: it asks big questions about social structure, health care, education, and the prison system, and also explores the domestic world of raising children and maintaining relationships. Grace Paley, my teacher and mentor, once said to me, “Women have done men the favor of reading their work and men have not returned that favor.” I think in many ways she was right—women read books by men and women and yet fewer men read books by women. Anyway, the point is, the American Novel is alive and well and being written by a broad range of talented writers.

The American nuclear family is also clearly a subject close to my heart. So many people feel disappointed by their own families and are increasingly building families of choice—constructing social/ familial units made of friends and extended family that they choose to spend time with. One of the things that I like about this novel is how Harry manages to build a life that includes everyone, from children to older people to the couple that own the local Chinese restaurant—it truly takes a village.

Your work is often described as “dark” and “controversial.” Do you like to write within this sort of territory because that’s where you feel most comfortable, or is it that you’re most interested in writing about things that frighten and disturb you?

My work is also often described as both transgressive and deeply moral—which I think is what’s both interesting and confusing for some people. I think work described as shocking or controversial means that it touches a nerve, and I can’t imagine wanting to write anything that didn’t touch a nerve. What would be the point of spending years writing a book only to have people say, Oh, that’s nice, and not be prompted to talk about the ideas in the book, to debate the subject matter? I have no interest in specifically frightening or disturbing anyone, but I do very much always want to write fiction that encourages people to look at themselves and the world around them differently.

More interestingly, I think, is to point out that all of my books have at their center a rather traditional moral core. In the end it always comes down to talking about what kind of a person are you—what do you expect of yourself and others and what role do you play in your community? I’m a big fan of people being able to do for others what they might not be able to do for themselves.